Kate Elliott's Blog, page 60

Onward

Has Cambyses' army been found at long last? Pretty incredible, if so, and the evidence is compelling.

Also, utterly awesome new jacket has been acquired. So awesome my sister got one, too.

Where Your Money Has Gone

The downtown streets of the small town outside of which I grew up and where my parents still live have been recently repaved (much needed, according to my parents; there were potholes you could swim in, my daughter said) with stimulus monies. A local small phone company/internet provider for a relatively isolated rural/small town area north of here is applying for stimulus money to improve his internet access from dialup to high speed so that rural residents can have better internet connect...

Seemingly Unrelated Things Make a Post

Nicholas Kristof on why, yes, we do need health care reform. Gacked from suricattus

From Tehran Bureau, Fariba Pajooh--Still in Jail, lest we forget. You know, the more I think about it, the more I reflect on how condescending toward the Iranian people those early "reports" and suppositions were that the whole post election protest (and its subsequent manifestations, which I try to follow) was merely a CIA deep cover operation, as if Iranians are some kind of dupes rather than educated, civi...

Deverry Heroes: Hottest Edition

I post over on deverry15: Which Deverry Hero is the Hottest?

Your STRONG opinions are solicited. Because I mean, really, who can have a lukewarm opinion on such a crucial topic?

World Fantasy Convention

I won't make a long list of names of people I hung out with, although they were utterly fabulous, or the people I met for the first time, although they were utterly fabulous (you see the trend here). This WFC had a very different and interesting vibe from other WFC's I've attended and I'm not quite sure what it was (besides the dry air that made many people get scratchy throats and which certainly sent me spiraling into some kind of allergic or cold reaction) except that people seemed very p...

WFC

Exhausted. Air is so dry that my throat and sinuses are now in full revolt. I slept horribly last night. Headed down for breakfast now.

What I really want to say is:

I love the sff community. What an awesome fabulous wonderful group of people.

More later. If I have the energy.

We Knew Her When

When we moved to Hawaii in 2002 we were advised frequently to avoid the public schools here. In the years since, we are not infrequently met with surprise when we mention that our children attended public schools here. I admit, we chose to live in Mililani in part because it has a reputation for having a particularly good set of neighborhood schools. Was the middle and high school here perfect? No, not by a long shot. Did my children have a few mediocre teachers? Yes.

But they also had e...

15 Days of Deverry

You may see information on this popping up in a few places over the next few days, so I'm not going to post the entire press release.

Suffice it to say that I completely and utterly love Katharine Kerr's Deverry cycle. The final novel in the sequence will be published at the end of the month, and a cabal of excited readers has put together a celebration: 15 days of Deverry (one for each volume). We've set up an lj community; there will be posts at Deep Genre; also, anyone, anywhere, is inv...

Catnip

People like me cannot resist sites like this:

One Hundred Pushups Training Program

With Bonus! Situps and Squats programs, too! With apps for your iPhone (which I do not have, but having just signed and sent back my contracts for the Cold Magic project, I am starting to think seriously about purchasing an iTouch, and I assume the apps work for the iTouch as well), and also a one page printout that folds into a tiny little pamphlet to carry with you on trips.

Life is good!

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

I've had a chance to read a pre-pub copy of N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. It will be published in Feb 2010, and is the first of a connected trilogy (not one story, but three stories set in the same world and with some connected threads, or so I understand).

Told from the point of view of Yeine, a young woman who finds out, quite abruptly, that she is one of three potential heirs to a rulership she never dreamed of wanting much less being forced to compete for, this is a story ...